Public Diplomacy

It is natural, at a time of low approval ratings for the United States overseas, to ask again whether it made sense in 1999 to dismantle the U.S. Information Agency and move parts of it into the State Department. As Melinda points out in her post (below), John McCain has weighed in on the subject, saying he regrets having supported the measure. Madeleine Albright, who pushed the idea to its fruition, now waffles when asked whether it was the right thing to do.
Like many other “veterans” of USIA, I recall that questions about the Agency’s organization and status were always being raised, throughout the USIA’s history, both in and outside the Agency, and in and outside Government. Most of us at USIA wanted some independence from the State Department bureaucracy, but we also wanted State to pay attention to our recommendations. Some believed that if we could just get the organization right, our public diplomacy problems would be over, and foreign public opinion would reliably support the United States. Tinkering with structure and lines of authority was a way of sidestepping the awkward truth that, without good policies, even the best public diplomacy organization is ineffective.

Lately U.S. government public diplomacy has taken a beating — due to its message, not its media. Having said that, recent coverage of the US Government’s TV broadcasts to the Middle East shows that even when the USG has a good story to tell, it’s easy for Washington to stumble as it tries to get the word out.

Better policies, and better public diplomats with more funding, is the way forward. Don’t look for this to be an election issue, but it would be nice to see a McCain or Obama transition team take the matter seriously.

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an interesting summary of how the world’s regions seem to feel about Hillary, Obama and McCain. That Barack Obama would be popular in Africa, Indonesia and the Mideast is perhaps no surprise. But he also appears to be quite popular in Europe, where I’m writing from this week. On the other hand, in Italy, my informal sampling of opinion showed that Hillary had her supporters as well — including among men. One told me he preferred her over Obama because “she has more scars” — more experience.

So far, despite his travels, John McCain doesn’t seem to have captured the popular imagination abroad. With the Republican contest now ended, McCain gets less coverage in the United States and, correspondingly, less coverage abroad. In Southeast Europe, Clinton’s admission that she exaggerated the danger she faced when she visited Bosnia in 1996, provoked unflattering news stories. The occasional story about John McCain’s shortcomings does not resonate much overseas. Perhaps this is because the U.S. media’s coverage is generally positive (see Neal Gabler’s piece in the NYT). For whatever reason, John McCain is more a cipher to the public — at least here in Europe.

ZAGREB — President Bush leaves for Europe in a few days. Likely one of the last foreign trips of his Presidency, Bush’s five-day visit to Kiev, Bucharest, and Zagreb offers him a chance to work on his image and his legacy — each in bad repair. The timing is both good and bad.

First the good: The NATO Summit in Bucharest, centerpiece of his trip, is the largest meeting ever of NATO heads of state and government, and comes with the kind of “visuals” that White House media relations staffers love: “group photos” of international statesmen with the U.S. President at the center, handshakes across conference tables, impressive dinners, exotic backdrops, and plenty of symbols of U.S. authority and prestige. He also visits Ukraine, a possible future member of the alliance, and Croatia, scheduled to receive a formal invitation to join NATO during the summit. Both of these countries have fresh memories of threats to their security (Ukraine in relation to Russia, Croatia in relation to Serbia), and therefore a broadly welcoming attitude toward NATO and the United States.

So far, so good. The less than favorable aspect to the trip’s timing lies in the still-rancorous dispute between Greece and Macedonia — that is, between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (its official name at the UN). Macedonia is another would-be NATO member and is expecting a formal invitation to join. But Greece adamantly opposes allowing the tiny Balkan state to have the same name as Greece’s northernmost province. Inexplicably, this long-standing objection has been allowed to fester during the lengthy process of Macedonia’s preparation for admission to NATO. Barring a last minute breakthrough, this unresolved dispute over nomenclature makes the alliance seem inept or careless in its Summit preparations.

Another awkward but much more substantive issue is Afghanistan. The open-ended deployment of US and NATO forces to Afghanistan is the alliance’s first real “out of area” challenge and it is far from clear that it is going well. Germany, for example, has opposed sending its troops from the relatively secure areas of northern Afghanistan to the dangerous areas of the south, where US, British and Canadian forces are in daily and deadly contact with Taliban fighters.

This conflict tends to get relatively little coverage in the US press but it is, in fact, the closest thing to a front line in the fight with armed Islamic terrorists. Now, because of the disagreement within NATO over burden sharing, this is a troubling portent for the alliance’s future.

As Nicholas Burns, the outgoing Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and former US Ambassador to NATO, put it last month:

NATO has now had to face an existential crisis of sorts. We are fighting in Kandahar, Oruzgan, in Helmand and Paktia provinces, United States military forces, with the Dutch and the Canadians and the British and the Estonians and the Romanians. But most of the other NATO allies are deployed to the west and to the north. When we have a firefight, as we did, a major firefight with the Taliban in September, and need tactical reinforcements, it’s incumbent upon the NATO allies to come to the support of those NATO allies engaged in the combat. That did not happen in September. And too many of our allies have said that they’re quite willing to be garrison troops in the northern and western parts of the country that are relatively quiet and peaceful, but not willing to come down to where the Taliban is crossing the border in great numbers and where al Qaeda is also taking on the American, Afghan, and those NATO allied forces that I named.

This is fairly ominous language and signals that, within NATO, consensus on Afghanistan is at risk.
Of course, having a fixed date well in advance of a Summit can serve the useful purpose of being a deadline by which solutions to knotty problems must be achieved. So we may find that the seemingly esoteric problem of Macedonia’s name and the existential problem of NATO’s deployments in Afghanistan will be solved, after all, before the 26 leaders meet in Bucharest late next week. (more…)

Is that the existential question? There’s been much made of recent comments by Obama advisers that came back to bite them. Economic adviser Goolsbee talked to the Canadian Consulate in Chicago regarding NAFTA, Samatha Power told a UK journalist that Hillary was a “monster.” Both learned the hard way that campaign advisers are fair game in this overheated contest.

I worry that the tone of this campaign will get uglier and every comment will get such scrutiny and opposition spin treatment (which is in turn picked up by the press) that the quality of public debate will suffer. If Benjamin Barber is right (see Desa Philadelphia’s post below) in saying that the candidates can no longer discuss candidly trade and other issues, and candidates’ advisers are chastened not to speak out, we will be left not with a campaign but a race to the least common denominator of politics: pandering. And then we will get the kind of thoughtless and superficial policies in the next President that the public now rightly condemns.

The good thing about the campaign for the U.S. Presidency is that it is getting unprecedented attention both at home and abroad. The not so good thing is that, because of what used to be known as the “CNN factor” (now “Youtube” and the Blogosphere), media reaction is instantaneous, unfiltered, “raw.” NPR is doing a good job of taking a more distanced, nuanced view of how the world sees the U.S. campaign. Its dispatches from Iraq, South Africa, China and Britain can be accessed here. I highly recommend them. I will also be heading to Europe in the coming days and will be trying to gauge foreign perspectives on the race and sharing them with readers here.

Given the pressures on candidates to pander, it may very well be that the best place now to observe the campaign is from a distance.